On a regular school day, four-year-old Kush Bhattacharya can leave his mathematics class to run barefoot on grass, hide from his friends in a cave made of cow dung and return to recite nursery rhymes in a red bus that doubles up as a classroom.
Kush is a student at the Aman Setu school in Pune, an educational and technological hub three hours drive from Mumbai.
Almost every part of the school premises is made out of recycled material, including roofs made out of old hoardings, walls built from plastic bottles and hand-stitched uniforms made out of eco-friendly khadi, or handspun, cloth.
“It isnt a marketing thing, its what we believe and how we live,” says Madhavi Kapur, who started the school in 2008 with just four students. The school now has more than 140 students studying up to grade five.
“We didnt have too much money to begin with, and one of my students, who is an architect came up with the idea of using recycled materials to build the school on a piece of land leased to me by my brother,” she said.
Starting off with a modest 600,000 rupees Kapur and architect Saurabh Phadke devised ways to build walls from mud and old cement bags.